I've been feeling pretty down the last week or two about the likely outcome of the election. It's many things... Kerry stumbling to find his message and some fire in his belly; the Republican convention; the polls; the conversation with a good friend who admitted she was one of the swing voters and hadn't made up her mind; the nasty people I get in arguments with online who think that the answer is to keep hitting back harder and harder rather than reconsider our global strategy; the storekeeper down the avenue from my house who has prominently posted a Bush/Cheney sign, a newspaper from September 12, 2001 with a picture of the World Trade Center wreckage, a sign saying "WE WON'T FORGET" and a verging-on-ridiculous number of American flags of varying sizes, as if his party somehow had a monopoly on the right to display that flag; the conversation with my boss where she said she thought about leaving the country; the conversation with my mother where she fretted about suitcase nukes and commented that she felt sad thinking about her children's lives and her new granddaughter, and how wrong the world around us seems to be going; the thousand-plus soldiers killed in Iraq because of the administration's distortions...
But today, when I was walking around Lake Merritt to BART, I came across this woman.
She says she dusted off her sign from the last Iraq war, and that it still works - all she had to do was insert a "W." with her marker. I asked her if she had been out there every day with her sign and she said, "No - I'm 87 and I can't stand for long periods of time. My marching days are over."
I wished her good luck and hoped that some good would come of it, and she said something like, "We have to keep on going, no matter what."
